MSI Fellow and Principal Investigator Efi Foufoula-Georgiou (Civil Engineering, St. Anthony Falls Laboratory) is one of the lead investigators on a new $720,000 grant just awarded to the University of Minnesota by the National Science Foundation. The University will be the lead organization in an international, multi-university virtual institute, called Linked Institutions for Future Earth (LIFE), which will study Earth-surface systems with emphasis on watersheds and deltas.
Professor Foufoula-Georgiou uses MSI resources to support research studying precipitation and water systems. Using data received from a number of sources, the Foufoula-Georgiou research group is analyzing and modeling rainfall across large portions of the earth’s surface. The datasets for both the precipitation measurements and for geological features (river networks, channels, etc.) are very large, necessitating the use of powerful computing capabilities and parallel computational capacity. Besides being on the faculty at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, Professor Foufoula-Georgiou the director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics and is a Resident Fellow at the Institute on the Environment.
More information about this grant, including a description of the LIFE virtual institute, can be found at the UMNews release.